Originally Posted by Julie Steiner
Hi, Glenn! Aha, you're toying with Frost's interlocking rubaiyat structure for "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening" again....
Guilty!
I also wonder who the intended audience is for this. The title suggests familiarity with the Catholic tradition of referring to death, judgment, hell, and heaven as "the Four Last Things," and L1 expects familiarity with Matthew 5:45. But isn't a reader who is already familiar with those prerequisites likely to be even more familiar with the dogmatic concepts mentioned in the poem? So why rehash all this stuff?
I was meditating on “the four last things” and wanted to organize my thoughts and feelings in a visual and arresting way.
S1: Is lust really the only sin dividing the just from the unjust?
It’s the only one that rhymes with “unjust” and “dust.”
S2: The narrator claims "my Judgment will come from Christ above," but within two lines of that statement he seems more concerned about the judgments of others: "The book of deeds I wrote on earth, each page, / will then be seen by all." Does the narrator actually fear people's judgments of him more than God's? If so, that's the most interesting thing in this poem, and I'd far rather read more about that than about the less surprising stuff that follows.
Somewhere in my childhood faith formation, it was impressed upon me that when I died, I would stand before God’s Throne and all my sins would be known by Him and by all people who ever lived. (Yes, I know. As if they would care about my puny sins with their own judgment imminent.) For some reason, it stuck with me. When I read Donne’s “Meditation XVII” in college, where he describes the next life as a place where like books we all lie open, each page read by every other page, I was powerfully affected. That is most of what I was going for here.
Also in S2: Referring to "the Father, Son, and Dove" strikes me as a touch too flippantly irreverent, if the narrator is seriously worried about his odds of ending up in Hell.
I intended no irreverence. I was referring to the Trinity using the most common visual trope in Western art.
S4: In the final line, the afterlife seems awfully late in the game for God to suddenly "keep me in His love’s protecting shell." What does someone already in Heaven need protection from? And where was that same "protecting shell" when it actually would have been helpful, i.e., when the anxious narrator was back on earth, so worried sick "devouring himself" with fear and self-loathing (as evidenced by the poem's existence) that he might as well have already been in Hell long before death?
God’s “protecting shell” (i.e. grace) was available to the narrator while he was alive. This is the point of S1L1. The N is working out his salvation in fear and trembling, as Paul advised him to do. He is aware as a sinner that he is not immune to possible damnation, but he seems to me to live in hope, not self-loathing.
Final thought (which need not be answered in this poem) — It puzzles me that musings about Heaven and Hell, such as this one, tend to ignore the idea of resurrection completely. If bodies are irrelevant, and matter doesn't matter after death, then what was the point of Easter? Don't most versions of the Final Judgment envision the dead getting bodies again BEFORE going to either Heaven or Hell (or Purgatory, strangely not mentioned among the Four Last Things)?
Yes. It is odd that bodies are not specifically mentioned in the “four last things.”
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